painfully old—­a look branded into her face by many an anxious hour’s listening for the footstep that never came, or only came to bring distress.  It was the ineffaceable token of that long, long struggle between affection and conscience, pity and scarcely repressible contempt, which, for more than one generation, had been the appointed burden of this family—­at least the women of it—­till sometimes it seemed to hang over them almost like a fate.

About noon Miss Leaf proposed calling for the hotel bill.  Its length so alarmed the country ladies that Hilary suggested not staying to dine, but going immediately in search of lodgings.

“What, without a gentleman!  Impossible!  I always understood ladies could go nowhere in London without a gentleman!”

“We shall come very ill off then, Selina.  But any how I mean to try.  You know the region where, we have heard, lodgings are cheapest and best—­that is, best for us.  It can not be far from here.  Suppose I start at once?”

“What, alone?” cried Johanna, anxiously.

“No, dear, I’ll take the map with me, and Elizabeth.  She is not afraid.”

Elizabeth smiled, and rose, with that air of dogged devotedness with which she would have prepared to follow Miss Hilary to the North Pole, if necessary.  So, after a few minutes of arguing with Selina, who did not press her point overmuch, since she herself had not to commit the impropriety of the expedition.  After a few minutes more of hopeless lingering about—­till even Miss Leaf said they had better wait no longer—­mistress and maid took a farewell nearly as pathetic as if they had been really Arctic voyagers, and plunged right into the dusty glare and hurrying crowd of the “sunny side” of Holborn in July.

A strange sensation, and yet there was something exhilarating in it.  The intense solitude that there is in a London crowd these country girls—­for Miss Hilary herself was no more than a girl—­could not as yet realize.  They only felt the life of it; stirring, active, incessantly moving life; even though it was of a kind that they knew as little of it as the crowd did of them.  Nothing struck Hilary more than the self-absorbed look of passers-by:  each so busy on his own affairs, that, in spite of Selina’s alarm, for all notice taken of them, they might as well be walking among the cows and horses in Stowbury field.

Poor old Stowbury!  They felt how far away they were from it when a ragged, dirty, vicious looking girl offered them a moss rose bud for “one penny, only one penny;” which Elizabeth, lagging behind, bought, and found it only a broken off bud stuck on to a bit of wire.

“That’s London ways, I suppose,” said she, severely, and became so misanthropic that she would hardly vouchsafe a glance to the hand some square they turned into, and merely observed of the tall houses, taller than any Hilary had ever seen, that she “wouldn’t fancy running up and down them stairs.”